Demodand

In an ancient war forgotten by most mortals, the thanatotic titans rose up against the gods in a horrific war. When the titans who launched this war were defeated, the gods banished them to the Abyss for eternity, where the gods hoped the titans' immense power would be contained. For millennia, the exiled titans seethed and brooded, convinced that only they were truly worthy of the adulation and worship of mortals—the bitter seed that had grown into their rebellion. This festering hatred mixed with arrogance led the thanatotic titans to create their own race of worshipers. They kneaded together the dark earth and polluted waters of the Abyss into clay the color of a starless night. The greatest of their sculptors and lifeshapers sculpted the clay into humanoid likenesses of themselves, the size of men but more comely, with proud visages, great draconic wings, and chiseled frames. Then the creators cut themselves and let their own blood flow into the empty shells of their creations, and let their own breath act as bellows, pumping blood and air into the sculpted figures to awaken them. Deeming their own powers to be deific, the titans reasoned that they could craft life and existence as well as the old gods. They were wrong.

The titans' sculpted paragons of might charred and melted, oozing into twisted shapes. These shapes, however, clung tenaciously to the spark of life imparted to them. Thus the demodands were born—a hideous race of creatures imbued with the fickle cruelty of their masters. Misshapen and foul to behold, demodands are known by some scholars as titanspawn. Despite their physical repulsiveness, however, all demodands possess a drop of their creators' titanic power. This trace of near-divine power makes them as formidable as they are vicious, and many demon lords have spent years, if not centuries, waging wars, foiling raids, and undoing the damage that demodands cause. As the thanatotic titans expand their influence and holdings in the Abyss with immortal patience, it is the demodands who act as their shock troops, generals, and slavers. Their preferred captives are mortals with some connection to the gods, such as clerics, paladins, or other believers. Demodands take great pleasure in torturing such captives before subjecting them to lives of abject servitude. During the countless years of ensuing labor, demodands slip foul, insidious whispers into the ears of their slaves, designed to challenge and ultimately erode their captives' faith. Those that succumb are taken before one of the thanatotic titans to be "redeemed," and are then sent back into the world as new believers, spreading the "true" faith of the evil titans. Such mortals often form clandestine cults dedicated to thanatotic worship, and are closely monitored by the demodands who first captured them. For those mortal slaves whose faith will not break, the demodands ensure that their bodies eventually do. Demodands have no such ulterior motives when they take demons as slaves, for they see their abyssal cohorts as little more than powerful servants to be used for their innate strength and spell-like powers. In particular, demodands prize powerful demons like glabrezus or nalfeshnees as status symbols if they can be held, and turn these slaves into bodyguards, or gladiators in the fabled thanatotic arenas. Shaggy demodands are also known to mount entire invasions into alternate planes of the Abyss to capture incubi and succubi to serve as pleasure slaves to themselves or their titan masters.

Unlike demons, who are created from the foulest of mortal souls, demodands procreate within the foul corners of the Abyss. Female demodands birth clutches upon clutches of eggs and then leave them to fend for themselves. Those that survive to the point of hatching then enter a gruesome race with their siblings, for demodands always hatch with a great hunger. With no parents to provide for them and no guaranteed source of food, they invariably turn on their brood mates for their first meal. Both the titans and the other demodands see this fight for survival as a necessity to make the race stronger. On occasion, more than one hatchling survives, usually by fleeing the dread hunger of its siblings.

When not gleefully carrying out the domineering orders of their masters, demodands rove the Abyss looking for foolish travelers and lost souls. Others use stealth to walk the Material Plane, where they can strike out in the name of their makers. Such demodands busy themselves defacing temples and holy sites, murdering religious leaders, or subverting entire communities. Despite worshiping their masters like deities, all demodands are imbued with the same bitter hatred of the divine that cast their makers from the heavens. This heretical fervor makes them particularly resistant to divine magic in all its forms, and all demodands have a weaker form of their progenitors' godslayer ability. Demodands take particular pleasure in disrupting the link between gods and their servants, and on the rarest of occasions have let prospective victims live after such attacks, knowing that it was not just its enemy's power, but its very faith that was shaken.

The only hatred that eclipses the demodands' loathing of demons and the religiously faithful is their fury at the celestial races. Within these vessels of divine power—angels above all others—the demodands see the incarnate form of all they were crafted to despise and destroy. Indeed, powerful individuals and evil cults alike who seek to destroy a good-aligned outsider often find that the payments they need to offer to enlist the services of even the mightiest of demodands are greatly reduced.